1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing control apparatus for controlling a stencil printing machine wherein a plurality of stencil sheets, which are made on the basis of printing data, are wound around printing drums with which a print sheet is brought into pressured contact to perform a stencil printing operation.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the pasts, it has been a usual practice to use a stencil printing machine which enables a single color printing and a multi-color printing to be performed by allocating different ink colors to respective printing drums. Such a stencil printing machine is constructed of, for example, a first printing drum, a second printing drum and a press drum which are rotatably located, with the first and second printing drums being placed in the vicinity of an outer circumferential periphery of the press drum with a central angle of about 90 degrees with respect to the center of the press drum.
With such a stencil printing machine, printing data and printing start-up command are input from a PC (personal computer) connected through a communication network. In response to printing data and printing start-up command, the stencil printing machine makes a stencil sheet on the basis of printing data, with the stencil sheet being then wound on the printing drum with an associated ink color for thereby executing the printing operation. In this case, there have been many instances wherein when using different ink colors, the printing drum is replaced with a new one. When this takes place, in a printer driver, it has been a usual practice to provide a display over a display panel of the stencil printing machine or a display monitor with a warning display which calls user""s attention to facilitate the printing operation to be executed with the different ink colors.
In order to control the multi-color printing operation with the PC wherein the printer driver is installed, conventionally, there have been many instances wherein printing data is transmitted to the stencil printing machine without any desired treatment. As a result, even in a case where the printing operation is implemented using the same ink color in consecutive pages, it was difficult to continuously execute the printing operation with color numbers used in each page. Further, since the printing operation is performed in a page order, there have been an increased number of times the printing drums are replaced for different ink colors, resulting in a degraded workability.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a printing control apparatus which enables a printing operation at an increased operating efficiency to meet user""s purposes in a multi-color printing operation, a recording medium which stores thereon a computer readable program, and a printing system.
According to a first aspect of the present invention, there is provided a printing control apparatus for controlling a stencil printing machine wherein a stencil sheet formed on the basis of printing data is wound around a replaceable printing drum with which a print sheet is held in pressured contact to implement a stencil printing operation, which comprises an information producing section configured to produce printing order information on the basis of image ink color information for each page contained in image data representative of an image to be reproduced in the stencil printing operation, in dependence on a page order, in which the stencil printing operation is executed, and the number of times the printing drum is replaced with, and an outputting section configured to output the image data and the printing order information to the stencil printing machine.
In accordance with the present invention, even when replacing the printing drum with a new one, printing order information is produced according to an image ink color to control the printing operation of the stencil printing machine.
According to a second aspect of the present invention, there is provided a computer-readable record medium having stored thereon a program for controlling a stencil printing machine wherein a stencil sheet is formed on the basis of image data and wound on an replaceable printing drum with which a print sheet is held in pressured contact to perform a stencil printing operation, which comprises an information producing section configured to produce printing order information on the basis of image ink color information for each page contained in image data representative of an image to be reproduced in the stencil printing operation, in dependence on a page order, in which the stencil printing operation is executed, and the number of times the printing drum is replaced with, and an outputting section configured to output the image data and the printing order information to the stencil printing machine.
In accordance with the present invention, the presence of a program read out into the computer allows the computer to functions as the aforementioned printing order information producing section and the aforementioned outputting section.
According to a third aspect of the present invention, there is provided a printing system which comprise a stencil printing machine wherein a stencil sheet is formed on the basis of image data and wound on a replaceable printing drum with which a print sheet is held in pressured contact to perform a stencil printing process, and a printing control apparatus including an information producing section configured to produce printing order information on the basis of image ink color information for each page contained in image data representative of an image to be reproduced in the stencil printing operation, in dependence on a page order, in which the stencil printing operation is executed, and the number of times the printing drum is replaced with, and an outputting section configured to output the image data and the printing order information to the stencil printing machine.
In accordance with the present invention, printing order information is produced on the basis of image ink-color information of each page contained in image data, which is then outputted to the stencil printing machine for controlling the printing operation of the stencil printing machine, thereby enabling the printing operation to be performed in a high operating efficiency to meet user""s purposes in the multi-color printing operation.